Grade School

Spinning Rulers Especially from an adult perspective, it's amusing to remember the things I used to do to avoid classroom boredom. It's also no less interesting to remember the effects these activities had on teachers and other students. One such way to pass the last minutes of second grade reading class was pretty simple actually. Once I'd finished reading how Sam ate the egg on the dish, I'd reach into my school notebook and retrieve my regulation metal-edge wooden ruler, which I'd then balance on the end of my sharp new yellow #2 pencil. The center hole in the ruler was just wide enough to let it sit nicely on top of that pencil, where I could then spin it just like a helicopter rotor. The effect was strangely hypnotic, and I could have spun that ruler and been entertained for the better part of an hour had no one ever interfered. The action itself was silent and relatively harmless-- at least compared to the myriad of other things most 2nd grade boys were doing. I'm still amazed that my classmates would, without blinking, put ketchup packets into the soap dispensers, sail paper airplane notes across the room directly to their addressee, and slingshot straightened paperclips into the classroom bulletin board with lethal accuracy. The problem arose, though, because I wasn't the only person in the class who enjoyed the ruler trick, and we quickly learned that looking across a classroom to the sight of a half dozen metal-edge rulers spinning on top of a half dozen #2 pencils was, for some indescribable reason, the most insanity-inducing scene that a second grade teacher could witness. The teacher had had little defense, either. At one point, finally able to put up with it no more, she jumped up from behind the huge rectangular teacher desk in the corner of the room, pointed her finger in that all too commanding teacher way, and demanded that we remove the rulers from our pencils before we put each others' eyes out. This speech only worked the first time. The next day, after I'd had a full day to think about it, particularly having wondered why the paperclip darts hadn't elicited the same argument, I reached into my notebook, withdrew my regulation metal-edge ruler, carefully slid it on top of a #2 pencil, and began spinning it as fast as it would go. As before, the teacher stood up and shouted, "What did I tell you about poking your eye out?" I then responded in the most polite and respectful voice I could muster, "Ma'am, that doesn't seem to be a problem." Simultaneously, I took the wooden ruler and bumped the flat end of it right up against my closed eyelid, demonstrating conclusively that the end of a wooden ruler was far wider than the width of the average second grade eye socket. There's no more triumphant moment, to a second grader anyway, than when he realizes he's won, legitimately, against an adult, particularly a teacher. I laid my pencil and ruler side by side on the desktop, pulled my second grade reading book out of my desk, and began reading the true story of the wild black puma in the trees.

A Crayon of a Different Color One of the most striking things about the last hundred years or so, to most people, is the way that any given morning a person can open up the newspaper, or turn on the television (an example in itself, actually) and be astounded by something new -- a strange new bit of technology or ingenuity which had never met human eyes before, but would be taken for granted soon afterward. Every day this happens. I recall the first time my grandmother laid eyes on a compact disc. I had received a compact disc player for Christmas. Sure, they had been around for several years, but I was the first in the family to own such a machine, and it seemed that many people in Lubbock, TX, were wary of purchasing one after remembering the somber mood when the family down the street (I'm sure such a family lived on every street), carefully placed their RCA LaserDisc player into the closet with the Betamax VCR and hopped into their station wagon to go spend the rest of their money on a VHS system like everyone else had. True to my wishlist, my grandmother (or my mother by proxy -- I never quite worked out the shopping process they followed) had gone to the record store, meandered back to the A-frame racks where the vinyl albums had been displayed less than a year before, and picked up the long, awkwardly-balanced cardboard box bearing the name of the Cure album on CD I had asked for. At that point it was still a theoretical construct-- music in a box just like any other medium-- the picture on the front looked just like the picture on the cassette and LP versions of the album. When I opened that box on Christmas, however, the glimmer of the lamps in the room reflecting off of the alternately silver and iridescent surface of the small disc immediately caught my grandmother's eye. "So this is a compact disc?" she asked. "I didn't know what it looked like. It's . . . I don't know." "Yes," I answered, turing the disc in my hands. "And it has music on it, like a record? How does it play?" "I think the player has a laser in it or something and reads the surface of the disc kind of like a phonograph needle," I speculated. I was fascinated by her fascination. This was an object which could have just as easily been a joke-- a prop lifted from a 1950s era trip to the moon movie, carefully pulled from behind a panel lit with dozens of palm-sized colored lights and alive with beeps and buzzes. "Yes sir, captain, it looks like the biparticulate aluminum energy disc is spent." Every day this happens. Whether it's a flat-screen computer monitor, a microwave oven, or an automobile that first catches you so off-guard depends on your age, your generation, your interests, and the little cultural pocket in which you live. It's no less fascinating, though, that people have grown accustomed to the effect. If a video game system is not obsolete in a year, it must not have been truly cutting-edge to begin with. I know people who upgrade their computers on a monthly basis-- who had never heard of a cell phone 5 years ago but are now surprised when anyone's phone number, not explicitly proclaimed as a "land line," has a real answering machine on the other end, instead of wireless voicemail. "Oh, I didn't realize that was your home phone. How can I really reach you?" I'm no better or no worse, myself, roaming the city carrying both a digital wireless phone and a two-way pager. We're a culture of technology addicts and snobs, who take an obsessive pleasure in snatching up the newest gadget as soon as it hits market, and then feigning boredom about it as soon as possible, at the expense of those who haven't yet "gotten with the times." "Hey sir," says the boy ringing up my groceries last weekend. "Is that one of those pagers that sends email and stuff?" "Yeah," I answer distantly. "It plays battleship, too." The boy is still eyeing the box. "Wanna see it?" I finally add. "No offense, but how often have you had to send an email from the grocery store?" he asks. I'm dumbfounded. There's no real answer to that question, but the mere fact that I'm carrying the thing implies that I should know. I take my sack of groceries, check the time on my cellphone display (I haven't worn a real watch for over a year), and rush home to check my email. My sister just graduated from high school this summer. at her graduation, one of the speakers mentioned the fact that these students had never known a time without MTV, without Rap music, without VCRs. People were amazed. I was, even, at first, until I started thinking about it. If you were born during the twentieth century at all, it's hard to count such a list with only two hands. I never saw a world without color television, without microwave ovens, without video games or computers. People have always had Visa and Mastercard and fluorescent lights. Even my grandmother doesn't know a world without automobiles and airplanes or a time without the radio, but even in this culture, if a person drops his guard and forgets to act jaded at each new leap in technology, he can still be astounded by some new little piece of wizardry. I remember the last time I was utterly shocked by something new and wonderful. I was in second or third grade. One morning a friend showed up at school with a huge smile, and opening up her box of school supplies, revealing a box of Crayola Fluorescent Crayons. They practically lit up the box from inside. "Do they glow in the dark? How do they seem so bright? Do they look that way on paper too? Here, write on my notepad with one so I can show the color to my friends!" With names such as Ultra Green, and Neon Yellow, they sounded as electric and energetic as they looked. There was a buzz of excitement at all the grocery stores in the neighborhood that evening, as every child in the class dragged their parents to buy them an 8 color box of the incredible new crayons. Soon every picture drawn in class included a house with an ultra green lawn and a fluorescent orange brick walk. Ultra blue birds dangled in an ultra bluer sky. Overnight the color of the world had changed. As anyone who was paying attention in that turning point of the 1980s knows, the culture couldn't stand for this color revolution to tear such a gaping hole in the technology apathy that had been so carefully guarded for decades. Indeed, a reaction was necessary, and one occurred. In what seemed like the matter of only a couple of weeks, every little girl's white canvas Keds tennis shoes were now fluorescent pink, and their white cotton laces had given way to neon yellow curly corkscrew laces which were left untied, to jut out the sides of the shoes, like a pair of space-age antennae. The old red, blue, and green Trapper Keeper notebook folders looked very dated and "primary colored" compared to the newer, brighter ones. The guys wasted no time trading in their Flash Gordon T-shirts and red, blue, or green striped white soccer socks for neon-colored Vuarnet shirts and Jams shorts. Not a single "old" white posterboard poster could be found on the walls of the school when the time came for the next student council elections. These became the colors of the mid-80s. And, of course, by the time the traditional orange school zone signs and red fire trucks were replaced by the better, brighter, neon yellow variety, no one pretended to notice, and no one acted surprised, and no one seemed concerned at how quickly these new colors had taken over our lives.